Galerie Christian Lethert is pleased to present the exhibition Worlds Within, which combines new drawings by Dutch artist Nelleke Beltjens and for the very first time paintings by Natascha Schmitten. Each in their own way create multi-faceted works which contain constantly variable and open pictorial spaces that brush existing worlds and explore new ones.

Thanks to the positive resonance of ONE/ other presented earlier this year at the Independent New York and OTHER/ one featured at the Independent in Brussels,
Delmes & Zander are merging the two exhibition concepts into one show featuring a selection of portraits and self-portraits simultaneously in both their Berlin and Cologne galleries. ONE / OTHER will show how the portrait as well as the self-portrait unabashedly mirrors the artist behind the work no matter if he portrays himself or whether he is portraying the other. Independently of their subject, the photographs and drawings reveal everything about their authors and their yearnings for a romanticised identity, no matter on which side of the camera or canvas. Evident in the works is a serialized, obsessive impulse to repeatedly pin down an image or identity that is manifestly idealized.

William Crawford portrays himself at the heart of his sexual fantasies: a graphic and detailed mise en scène in which Crawford is king. In his bright coloured paintings, Alexander Lobanov poses bravely, adorned by a Kalashnikov and Soviet symbolism – the image of a fearless man, a classical hero.

At times the portraits depict their authors as sufferers, preyed upon by the load of the world: Michail Paule is the threatened figure at the center of a phantasmagorical and uncanny place. Aurel Iselstöger's self-portraits illustrate him with a grotesque smile across his face, as if his mouth were torn but shut in silence, eyes to the ground. In the photo collages of Obsession, an unknown author who portrays women at the stake ready to burn or on their knees before decapitation, also pastes himself into the work both as the executioner as well as a victim.

Paul Humphrey repeatedly shuts the eyes of his subjects in the act of drawing, turning his Sleeping Beauties into docile women, innocent and powerless; Morton Bartlett shapes his dolls with his own hands, small in size and with childlike obedience, then photographs them as if for his his own private family album. The portraits of Margret, taken in the impenetrable complicity of a love affair set in the 1970s, transform her into an idealized creation of her lover and employer Günter K.. Similarly, Eugene von Bruenchenhein turns his wife Marie from exotic princess to tinseltown temptress in the photos shot in the intimacy of their hermetical domesticity.

In its painstaking rigour, the works often acquire an archival, sequential character. This is not only the case with Miroslav Tichy, who set out to photograph one hundred women a day, but also with Type 42, the encyclopedic body of anonymous work taken of female movie stars or even in Margarethe Held's lifework documented in The Uncontrollable Universe: an attempt to pin down the chaos unleashed by inner visions in a publication which brings together pictures bestowed upon her from the beyond.

In ONE / OTHER it becomes clear that the works are always an end in itself: a necessary endeavor to shape an image and to make it compatible with the artists innermost fantasies. The result is a many-layered exploration of self-reflection and an oftentimes surprising study on the means and mirrors that are chosen to make wishful thinking real,
be it in the shape of one or the other.

The Michael Werner Kunsthandel is delighted to announce the opening of the exhibition „Georg Baselitz – Picture and drawing“ which presents to a Cologne audience a superb and unique selection of examples from the artist's work from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Two important works of museum quality, the diptych „Nude and Bottle“ (1977) and the quadriptych „Pear Tree 1“ (1978), form the centrepiece of the show. Large format works on paper along with 22 charcoal drawings from the late 1980s clearly demonstrate that this kind of medium did not simply represent preparatory sketches for paintings but that Baselitz employed it to explore radical new forms of composition.

The artist is generally known for his inversion of motifs, a method that provoked a lot of publicity but was widely misunderstood. „If an artist wants to continue painting without fudging or making up motifs, inversion is an obvious choice […] for me a picture is an autonomous object, only reliant on itself […].“ (Georg Baselitz in conversation with Walter Grasskamp, 1984). In order to isolate his pictures from associations and interpretations, he turns our normal and habitual way of seeing things on it’s head. He speaks in this context of the need for disharmony and disruption as a creative principle in his work.

„Pear Tree 1“ (1978) is a good example of this. A pear tree can be portrayed in many different ways, especially as , in German, it almost inevitably evokes the famous ballad by Theodor Fontane. Baselitz‘ focus on the process of painting is emphasised by the serial format of the quadriptych in which the organic forms of the tree are transformed into the rhythmic structure of the brush strokes. A similar process take place with the diptych „Nude and Bottle“ (1977). Nudes and still lifes are classic motifs in the history of art, but by combining them in a diptych the artist irritates our expectations. The unnatural posture of the figure that runs counter to all the conventions of genre turns the human body into an object which relates on a formalistic level with the bottle on the right.

Georg Baselitz has been one of the foremost contributors to the development of German post-war art for over 50 years. His productive and questioning approach puts into doubt the fruitless distinction between figurative and abstract art. His series of works entitled „Heroes“ and „New Types“ are currently on show in a major exhibition in the Frankfurter Städel Museum.